An over-complex robot-based microfactory put into operation by “poor leadership” caused the collapse of British EV start-up Arrival, according to an Autocar source.
Arrival crashed into UK administration this week, having never delivered a customer van despite claiming 10,000s of orders and having burned through £1.5 billion of investment (from key automotive players including Kia and Hyundai) on a breakthrough electric van design and a futuristic factory in Bicester to build it.
Sources believe Arrival was condemned from the moment, in around 2019, when top management opted for fully robotised production, which is understood to have pushed back production by at least two years at a time when Arrival had no income from sales, while finding new investors proved problematic.
“You have to make revenue; you have to sell product in this business,” said a source. “They were in a position when they could have gone into production with manual labour-based production. They had the money. But this was absolutely a leadership issue. It wasn't credible to move to robotics.”
The receiver, London-based consultantcy firm EY, acknowledged Arrival’s troubled production "delay" but blamed “challenging market and macroeconomic conditions”. A creditors report due in late March should clarify that.
Arrival was ready to start production around 2020/21, three years after showing its design. It chose a microfactory concept that would localise production to big markets, reducing the carbon footprint of logistics and assembly.
Tooling had to be low-cost and consequently aluminium beams for the chassis/cab and thermoset plastic for the body were chosen – exotic for a van but known technology.
But at a point when production lines needed designing, management pivoted away from a traditional manual labour system to a robot-dominated, unproven system featuring five flexible-manufacturing cells, each fitted with multiple Kuka robots, all served by a fleet of 150 logistical robots to transport minor parts, sub-assemblies and finished vehicles.
There were theoretical advantages, but none of that mattered, as it proved impossible to put into operation.
The robots, for example, had to be developed in-house, which turned into a major distraction. Called Wemo, for Wheeled Mobility, the system absorbed a team of up to 50 engineers for three years - 2019 to 2022 - to invent the system from scratch. Yet at the end, it still hadn’t built a single van.
It certainly looked revolutionary when Autocar visited the Bicester factory in April 2022. The manufacturing cells and robots were on site and the promise was real: here was a start-up boldly stepping away from manufacturing convention.
Add your comment